Practical tips for small biz owners

Archive for September, 2008

Several times today, I received an email in my various email Inboxes, asking for personal information. The email looks something like this (below). DO NOT respond to email scams like this. Never, never give out your login ID or password via email (think about it: shouldn’t the email company already have this?), and never, never, never give out your birth date:

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.

It goes on from there to ask for all kinds of personal information. In fact, that’s a great test to see whether it’s a scam or not. There’s no reason why Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL should need your birth date. When people start asking for your password, that’s the time to say to yourself, “Uh oh! This is fishy!” (Or is it “Phishy”?)

Did you know that your laptop, cell phone charger, computer monitor, and printer can draw electricity, even when they’re not turned on? This is also true of items around your home: your television, cable TV box, and other power tools. This is called Phantom Power, or sometimes Phantom Energy or Standby Power.

When some electrical items are plugged into a socket, they pull electricity even when they’re not turned on. This wastes electricity and increases your electric bill but doesn’t benefit you at all.

Discovery.com has a great article entitled “Save Energy by Avoiding Phantom Power” that is very helpful and includes links to other Green Living articles. They say that phantom power can account for as much as 10% of the electricity an office or home uses. Wow!

Here’s what we’ve done in our office to reduce the amount of phantom energy drawn:

Put all items that draw phantom energy, like our laser printers, computer speakers, and computer monitors on a power strip, which we turn off each night.

Unplug items we don’t use every day, like cell phone chargers.

Pay attention when recharging items like laptops, and remove them from the charger when the battery is full (instead of leaving it on charge all night).

Turn off items when not in use. For instance, I use my laser printer all the time, but only use my color printer occasionally. Why pull power for a color printer that I use once a week?

Always look for energy-saving devices when replacing an item.

Here’s the key with running a Green Office: all these little items DO add up to big savings and a decrease on natural resources. It’s worth doing.